I was walking around with my parents at Apple Hill today, looking at bunches of apples, pumpkins, and various crafts when I saw the headline “Manga comics losing longtime hold on Japan” in a copy of yesterday’s USA Today that was in a trash bin. So I made a mental note of it, checked out the article when I got home, and apparently there is a big problem of sorts. Sales fell the fifth consecutive year in 2006 and manga magazine sales are far from their 1995 peak of 1.34 billion with a figure of 745 million last year, about a 44% drop. The reporter noted that that high year was when Weekly Shonen Jump stopped carrying Dragon Ball. There were four likely causes given that primarily involve the habits of young Japanese people.

1. An obsession with cellphones, the Internet, and video games
Susan Napier, a professor of Japanese language and literature at Tufts University and “manga expert”, said that manga readership was at an all-time high when the above three technologies were just gaining speed so it makes sense for there to be a falloff from that point in time. Robert Kelts, author of Japanamerica, had the following to say:

Japanese youths and office workers are especially distracted by their state-of-the-art cellphones: “The cliché of the salaryman leafing through a phonebook-sized manga on the subway has given way to the ‘thumb tribes’: millions of Japanese holding their cellphones inches from their noses and frenetically typing their tiny cellphone keypads with their thumbs, running through e-mails, websites, videos,” Kelts says.

The displacement of attention from one medium to a bunch of new, blossoming formats of entertainment has also affected the American broadcast television industry as people are spending more time online, playing video games, or watching DVDs. The article mentions sales of downloadable cellphone manga has been successful but one 21-year-old college student was quoted about some usability problems with that method of content delivery: “It is cumbersome and takes time to download and scroll.”

2. Tired of reading the traditional way

Masaharu Kubo at the Research Institute for Publications said that all types of books, magazines, and newspapers are losing readership and that “people are losing the habit of reading.” Once again, this is similiar to an issue facing American businesses with the newspaper industry consolidating and magazines such as Business 2.0 shutting down due to poor ad support. This also relates to the first point of people being shifting use of their time to digital devices: they are becoming or are already accustomed to read text on screens and straying from pulp publications.

3. Bored with the plots and characters manga offers

Writing last year in the monthly magazine Ronza, manga specialist Matt Thorn at Kyoto Seika University complained, “Japanese manga all came to resemble one another. They have fallen into a rut. … Japan still produces more manga than all the other countries in the world combined, but there is little real variety or originality in the output.”

This is the one I am most concerned about because it could also (or maybe already has) spread to the anime scene due to the wide adaptation of manga into anime. If there isn’t compelling stuff for people to read, they won’t buy it – it’s that simple. Once again, I feel I must highlight a parallel to American enterprise: this time to the film industry. Movie tickets have slumped many times in recent years and executives have tried to blame piracy and now video games for why people aren’t seeing movies in the theatres while not really considering the possibility of crappy movies like The Heartbreak Kid being at fault. Many people, myself included, are willing to wait until a movie they are mildly interested in seeing comes out on DVD or cable to watch it. I do go to see some of the movies I really want to experience but sometimes the film is a independent one that isn’t playing in my town so I decide to just wait instead of trying to travel to the only place in the region where I can see it.

Got a bit of off-topic there but I’ll bring it back to why this may be good for manga: if the stuff that people aren’t reading is mostly crap, then that’s a good thing that they are voting with their wallets and will hopefully lead to better offerings. But some really great manga are likely also caught up in this decline which would be sad if that also were the case. There was also a quote that really hit me when I read it:

[Researcher Tastsuhiko] Murakami agrees: “There is a shortage of good artists.”

So it’s not just that the stories are blending together but also the art styles. It makes me think how the “How to Draw Manga” books could be a bad influence on budding young American artists…

4. The potential pool of readers is shrinking

Everyone is pretty aware by now that Japan has a birthrate crisis and this is just another instance of it showing its ugly head. Fewer youngsters are around to read Jump and those who might have once actively read manga when they were younger are likely retiring or just to busy to deal with it as they get older. The remedy for this issue would take a while – i.e. making more babies – but it IS something that can be changed and would benefit the wider Japanese economy in the long-term as there would be an eventual rise in the workforce.

Manga won’t be disappearing anytime soon but it seems it’s not as healthy as it once was among the Japanese. There needs to be more compelling art and stories to increase readership in Japan and perhaps better marketing to go with that, although both those are easier said than done. It’s a bit strange that this is happening at a time when manga growth is still strong on American bookshelves. That success is partially due to the fact that U.S. publishers can pick and choose which stuff they think is good and will sell based on various metrics, an advantage that their Japanese counterparts lack. Hopefully too much crap won’t come over here and affect our market as well…

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2007 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Japan, Manga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.